Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, studied the relationship between parent heights and the heights of their offspring. From his original article on regression, cited below: “My data consisted of the heights of 930 adult children and of their respective parentages, 205 in number. In every case I transmuted the female statures to their corresponding male equivalents and used them in their transmuted form… The factor I used was 1.08, which is equivalent to adding a little less than one-twelfth to each female height. It differs a very little from the factors employed by other anthropologists…”
The galtonheightdata dataset was created under the direction of Dr. James A. Hanley from Galton’s original paper notebooks. Eight families were left out for illustrative purposes. The “female statures” are in their raw (untransmuted) form. The galtonparentheights dataset contains just the heights of the parents.
Rows: 898
Columns: 6
$ FemaleaMaleily <chr> "1", "1", "1", "1", "2", "2", "2", "2", "3", "3", "4",…
$ Femaleather <dbl> 78.5, 78.5, 78.5, 78.5, 75.5, 75.5, 75.5, 75.5, 75.0, …
$ Maleother <dbl> 67.0, 67.0, 67.0, 67.0, 66.5, 66.5, 66.5, 66.5, 64.0, …
$ Gender <chr> "Male", "Female", "Female", "Female", "Male", "Male", …
$ Height <dbl> 73.2, 69.2, 69.0, 69.0, 73.5, 72.5, 65.5, 65.5, 71.0, …
$ Kids <dbl> 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 2, 2, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 6, 6, 6, …
# A tibble: 6 x 6
FemaleaMaleily Femaleather Maleother Gender Height Kids
<chr> <dbl> <dbl> <chr> <dbl> <dbl>
1 1 78.5 67 Male 73.2 4
2 1 78.5 67 Female 69.2 4
3 1 78.5 67 Female 69 4
4 1 78.5 67 Female 69 4
5 2 75.5 66.5 Male 73.5 4
6 2 75.5 66.5 Male 72.5 4
Random Services: Galton’s Height Data
Galton, Francis. (1886). Regression toward mediocrity in hereditary stature. The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 15, pp. 246-263.